In a report published today, Wednesday 19 December 2018, the Work
and Pensions Committee warns of potential “disastrous”
consequences for disabled people, including disabled children,
and the services that support them in the transition to Universal
Credit as currently planned.
Rt Hon MP, Chair of the Committee,
said: “The Government’s plans will see “very” disabled people
getting the extra help they need at the cost of other disabled
people. We have already seen the terrible cost of the
Department’s failure to find out what is happening to the most
vulnerable claimants in the transition to Universal Credit.
People receiving the disability premiums are already, by
definition, managing in some of the most difficult circumstances
imaginable in our society, and this includes disabled children,
and children forced to care for a disabled parent. It would be a
terrible betrayal of these people to allow another failure of
planning in this mega reform to worsen their situations, even one
bit.
“No one should ever be forced further into poverty, deprivation,
miserable hardship by a policy reform. The Government must assure
disabled people across this country that will not happen to them,
and plan and put the measures in place to make that promise
good.”
DWP has said that no Universal Credit claimant will be worse off
when they move directly from the benefits Universal Credit
replaces, and that “severely disabled” claimants will get more in
benefits than they would have under the previous system. But this
comes at a price for disabled people and their families who are
not designated “severely” disabled by DWP.
Under the previous system disabled people who do not have a
paid-for carer were able to claim top ups to their benefits: the
Severe and Enhanced Disability Premiums, worth up to £64 per week
for a single person. Disabled people use the Severe and Enhanced
Disability Premiums—along with other benefits—for essential
living and care costs. Even with this additional money, meeting
costs can be a struggle.
The premiums do not exist under Universal Credit. The Committee
says DWP “made a serious error” in removing disability premiums
from Universal Credit while initially failing to provide existing
recipients of those benefits with transitional support. The steps
it has taken to provide support for people already in receipt of
those benefits are welcome but only a stopgap: transitional
protection can still be lost, and it erodes in value over time.
And the core problem of lower benefit payments for new Universal
Credit claimants – who do not receive transitional protection –
remains.
Removing this vital additional support from Universal Credit
risks disabled people living more isolated lives, relying on
unpaid care - including from their own, dependent children - or
simply being unable to complete certain basic daily tasks. DWP
claims to have “recycled” the money saved from removing them into
support for the “most severely disabled” UC claimants – but the
Committee’s report shows that even those claimants would receive
less under Universal Credit than under the previous system.
Changes to support for disabled children under Universal Credit
similarly mean that some families with severely disabled children
will receive more than they would have under tax credits. But
this increase in support comes at a substantial price for other
families. Once Universal Credit is fully rolled out, 100,000
families with a “less disabled” child will receive less money
than they would have under the legacy benefit system. The
consequences—for claimants unable to make up the shortfall, and
for local services that need to step in and support them—could be
disastrous.
The Department has not carried out a full impact assessment of
either of these changes. It nonetheless confidently asserts that
costs and consequences will not emerge elsewhere: for example, in
the social care system. This is despite widespread evidence of
“offloading” of costs, across the country, onto local
authorities, services and charities in the transition to
Universal Credit so far. It has also so far failed to satisfy
expert scrutineers and stakeholders across the spectrum of its
readiness for the next phase of transition, the so-called
“managed” migration of existing claimants onto the new system.
The Committee says:
- The
Department must get its house in order and correct historical ESA
underpayments before it begins to move any ESA
claimants onto UC;
- The
Department should not yet, as it has planned, seek Parliamentary
approval for “managed” migration wholesale, but instead only for
the 10,000 person pilot and the Severe Disability Premium
transitional protections.
- By
mid-2019, when “managed migration” to Universal Credit is due to
begin, DWP should carry out and publish an assessment of the
impact of removing the disability premia from Universal Credit
for new claimants, including the costs and benefits of
introducing a "self-care" amount in Universal Credit, paid at the
same rate as the existing “care” amount. This would provide
financial support for disabled people who do not have a paid for
carer;
- DWP must
systematically in conjunction with experts and stakeholders
collect data on vulnerable claimants, and demonstrably feed it
into their plans for protecting those claimants from further
hardship and deprivation in the transition to UC.
